We meet the winner of the best new chef award at the inaugural UK’s Top New Restaurant Awards, Adejoké Bakare, at her restaurant, Chishuru, in London’s Fitzrovia. The Nigerian-born chef’s usually cheery face is a picture of concentrated solemnity amid a hiss of steam in the open kitchen. Though it’s lunchtime on a weekday, Chishuru is buzzing with diners, as word of this restaurant has spread since January when Bakare was awarded a Michelin star, the first Black woman to achieve such an accolade. “There’s been an increase in customers for now,” she says, “and an increase in the uptake of people experiencing how a Michelin-starred restaurant should look and feel like.”
Through her cuisine, which she describes as a “contemporary take on regional cuisine in Nigeria and across West Africa”, Bakare has introduced an unfamiliar flavour profile to a Michelin scene unhabituated to scotch bonnets, bean cakes, okra and spinach stews. She is unique in more ways than one – Black women Michelin-star chefs may be a rarity but so too are self-taught ones. Bakare has never received formal training. After first learning how to cook from her grandmother, she soon knocked up meals for her family. “I started off experimenting on my siblings and my dad. My dad is a great sport,” she chuckles. “I started collecting cookbooks when I was 10 years old. I would see some things and try them out and go, ‘taste that’. It informed how I cooked and evolved from there, basically.”
Sophie Knight
Sophie Knight
However, until just five years ago, cooking remained just a hobby. When Bakare moved to Britain 20 years ago, she studied microbiology at university before holding jobs in health and safety and at a London property company. Being a high-end restaurateur was not on the agenda, but her innate talent inevitably levitated her in that direction. The journey began when she held her first supper club for friends and family at Well Street Kitchen in Hackney. Events like these went down so well that Bakare began entertaining thoughts of a career in food, but she was initially reticent. On a friend’s recommendation, she entered the amateur section of the Brixton Kitchen competition in 2019 where the judges, impressed by her fusion of West African flavours, declared her the winner. Fusion is the key word here: Bakare is what you might call ‘all-Nigerian’ – raised in the northern city of Kaduna by a Yoruba mother from the south west and an Igbo father from the east of the country. This exposure to three distinct cultures and cuisines informs the cosmopolitanism she brings to her food, which is also inspired by broader West African recipes outside of Nigeria. That’s why she labels her dishes as ‘West African’ rather than anything location-specific.
Interiors at Chishuru
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